The Conspirators

Mike and Chris close the book on Season Seven with "The Conspirators," a 1978 episode that takes Columbo somewhere the series rarely ventured: the murky, morally weighted world of real geopolitical conflict. Clive Revill — Tony-nominated stage actor, Matilda's trainer in the boxing kangaroo film of the same name, and the original voice of Emperor Palpatine in The Empire Strikes Back — plays Joe Devlin, an Irish poet and public charmer who moonlights as a gun-runner for the IRA.

Devlin doesn't irritate Columbo the way most killers do — he disarms him. They exchange verse, play darts, share whiskey, and trade jokes about their respective cultures, two sides of the same immigrant coin. We weigh whether all that conviviality comes at the cost of tension. An episode this pleasant can sometimes forget to be dangerous.

Directed by Leo Penn and written by Howard Berk, "The Conspirators" is not Season Seven's sharpest hour. As the last Columbo of the 1970s, the last on NBC, and the last new case the Lieutenant would face for nearly eleven years, it leaves a lot to be desired.

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